The difference may seem trivial, but it raises profound questions about the meter’s ability to measure listener intent.

The meter can’t tell you whether the panelist is listening to the station or is simply in the vicinity of someone who is.

More troubling is the fact that repeated Arbitron analyses have shown that when panelists leave a station, they rarely tune to another. They simply disappear.

Maybe the radio station was switched off, or maybe the meter simply lost the signal because of noise and interference, or the panelist tucked the meter away.

So we can’t assume that what the station was doing at the time had anything to do with a change in the meter count, up or down.

There’s also research that shows that listening spans for virtually every format are nearly identical. Formats don’t seem to matter. Rock, CHR, Country listeners all listen for ten minutes at a time.

That suggests that meter flows are driven more by meter technical issues than listener behavior.

These issues are enough to raise serious questions about whether PPM is capable of measuring listener likes and dislikes.We also can’t forget that PPM meter counts for most stations are abysmally low.

It might seem that just trending meter counts over time could overcome the inadequacy of sample, but that defense overlooks one important point about PPM.

In the diary world participants rotate out every week. New people replace last week's participants, so the independent sample increases over time.

That's not the case with PPM. Nielsen minimizes turnover with the same panelists carrying meters week after week for years.

Over time the apparent in-tab for a song’s score may grow, but the majority of panelists are the same people.

We’re back to our one person music test with the same panelists rating a song over and over.

If that’s not enough to make you skeptical, let’s look at the meters themselves.

The 1980s technology behind the meter relies on an analog system to separate the encoded signal from the broadcast audio, ambient noise, and interference. Research has shown that PPM meters miss at least 30% of the listening that it ought to recognize.

So there’s drop-out.

Because of the drop-out, Nielsen computers use a series of editing rules to fill in the gaps. For example, you can get up to three minutes of credit for a period of time when the meter can’t ID the station if the meter later finds your station.

That’s just one of several editing rules that fill in the gaps created when the meters get confused.

As a result of the gaps and editing rules that fill them in, minute by minute is really not as precise as it might appear.

Maybe your meter count increased because of editing, and the panelist was listening all the time. Maybe the count declined because the meter could no long confirm that the panelist was still listening. Maybe the panelist wasn’t even listening to the station.

All are possible, and while these sorts of problems tend to average out over weeks and months, it makes drawing conclusions about what is happening with meters every minute questionable.

Any one of these problems ought to disqualify PPM as a tool for testing content. Taken as a whole, it suggests that randomly choosing which songs to play is as accurate as relying on meter flows.

If you really care about playing songs that your listeners want to hear, the only reliable way to do it is to ask them.

October 06, 2014

Develop an ongoing measure of "affinity" that is designed to reflect the advertising value of the unique relationship listeners have with their stations. The mission of this (effort) is to design a relevant, timely and accessible metric that captures audience involvement.

At the time we noted that the company’s new found interest in measuring affinity was ironic because Arbitron had essentially stopped measuring affinity when it switched to PPM.

A year after the announcement without much explanation the idea was dead. There would be no engagement metric–at least from Arbitron.

We speculated that Arbitron may have killed the idea because engagement measures an active listener wilfully choosing one station over another.

PPM does not measures listening. It measures only “drive-by” exposure. Arbitron could not repurpose PPM ratings to create a measure of engagement.

Ironically, while PPM cannot tell us anything about engagement, the diary does.

It is a good instrument to measure engagement because the listener herself writes down the stations she listens to, and how often. If she is really engaged with a station, she is going to write it down a lot.

Now five years later, another company is rolling out an engagement metric, but not for radio. For web advertising.

And the irony is particularly telling given that the Media Rating Council (MRC) has already accredited the engagement metric. It’s from a company you’ve probably never heard of, Chartbeat.

Web analytics firm Chartbeat says it is the first to be certified by the Media Ratings (sic) Council for a new way of measuring the actual attention of readers, as part of a move to get publishers and advertisers to stop focusing only on clicks and pageviews.

Chartbeat measures the amount of time a viewer spends reading online content arguing that the time spent with content is more important than things like unique viewers.

As we pointed out in the 2009 post:

We at Harker Research have found that there is a strong correlation between high Time Spent Listening (TSL) and affinity. As one goes up, the other one does too. If a listener has a natural attraction towards a radio station, she probably listens to it a great deal. She listens less to a station that she feels less strongly about.

Read the prediction of one digital ad analytics firm as reported by AdAge:

With the viewability standard in place, creative agencies should expect the ground to continue shifting toward attention metrics -- whether cost per hour, cost per 30 seconds or something else. "I don't think it will be one single metric," said Jonah Goodhart, CEO of Moat, a digital ad analytics firm. "We will see a shift on transacting on viewability in late 2014 or early 2015," he added. "This idea of buying media on the metric that makes the most sense for you is where we'll see the world going."

Yet at a time when advertisers are embracing engagement and turning away from metrics of reach and unique viewers, radio is heading in the opposite direction, using a measurement that emphasizes reach over engagement.

PPM “atomizes” radio reducing radio listening into homogenous ten minute listening spans preventing radio from capitalizing on its unique ability to engage.

Maybe Nielsen should take another look at engagement. Maybe Arbitron was on to something in 2009, but didn’t have the right tools to develop the metric.

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